Huh? Then what is the key point? Why does it say "The Rule of Drama ensures that nobody will get a legitimate winning lottery ticket and just cash it unless "character wins the lottery" is the core premise of the work"?

And if you're right, does that justify the use of this trope for the appearance of lottery tickets in a plot in general?

Well, just to start off with, it generally indicates that at least one character in the work is a gambler (and probably not very good at math). :)

eta: Broad supertropes often don't have a lot of specific meaning. The Protagonist doesn't tell you much except that the story actually has one or more main characters. But this is clearly not chairs—lottery tickets don't appear in stories for no reason, even if there can be a wide range of reasons.

Lottery tickets may always have significance, but if they're unrelated significance, it's not a single trope. We can make a trope about someone's gambling addiction to lottery tickets, and one about the lottery ticket plot where a character gets a winning ticket that proves somehow invalid, and one about a character winning the lottery but then suffering a string of bad luck. But those are all different tropes. In fact, they could all probably be lumped with other tropes - just not lumped with each other.

The Protagonist is the main character of the story. That is the trope's significance. It applies with every subtrope. A lottery ticket is a piece of paper. It can be significant, but in various independent ways, and each alleged subtrope has different significance.

A lottery ticket doesn't necessarily have to be a piece of paper. We could broaden the concept, while still keeping the name as an iconic and most-common example.

As I say, I'm still thinking about this. I'm not convinced one way or the other yet.

eta: but I'm not sure what the specific significance of having a main character is. The main character can mean all sorts of things, depending on the story—just as a lottery ticket can mean all sorts of things depending on the story. Like a protagonist, though, a lottery ticket is always significant.

^ Agree with all this. For example, if someone is addicted to lottery tickets, that should go under a tripe for gambling addiction, not Lottery Ticket - and that trope should be Gambling Addiction, not Lottery Addiction because the latter isn't a distinct trope.

This discussion is quite similar to the open one on wills. There, we agreed that wills are always significant, but {{Wills} isn't a trope. Rather, many tropes exist about wills.

Added a crowner for renaming the current trope while we discuss whether or not we need any other lottery ticket tropes. If we choose to have a supertrope later, we can simply remove the Lottery Ticket redirect and use it.

The system doesn't know you right now, so no post button for you. You need to Get Known to get one of those.

Alternative Titles: Lottery Ticket
30th Nov '12 1:10:53 PM

Vote up names you like, vote down names you don't. Whether or not the title will actually be changed is determined with a different kind of crowner (the Single Proposition crowner). This one just collects and ranks alternative titles.

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